Accumulation and creativity

Surplus and creativity are two fundamental components of development whose relationships are complex and interdependent. If any new surplus broadens the horizon of life and calls for creative and innovative re sponses, the latter in turn need the surplus as the essential material medium through which they can come into being. Every culture, however, sets limits on the development of creativity which are in keeping with the process of reproduction of the society to which that culture belongs. The limits of the creativity specific to the culture which stemmed from the bourgeois revolution are fixed by the predominance of instrumental rationality, by the progressive subordination of all forms of creativity, and particulary science and art, to the process of accumulation.